Free Pilgrim by Timothy Findley Page B

which sang to her in the mornings before she left the house to take up her duties in Herr Munster’s kitchen. Every day began with the removal of their night-cloth and every day ended with its replacement.
    One day, when young Johannes was not quite sixteen, Frau Eda returned from the lawyer’s house to discover the bird cage was empty.
    Elvire and Johannes were questioned. Both denied having any knowledge of how the birds might have escaped.
    Two days later, Elvire opened a drawer in Johannes’s bureau in order to deposit some freshly laundered shirts. The drawer was filled with wings. Finch wings.
    Horror-stricken, she sat on her brother’s bed. It was noon. He would soon return from school and want his lunch.
    Rising, she closed the drawer and went downstairs.
    While Johannes was seated at table, his face leaningdown towards his plate of soup, she watched him—thinking how like his father he had become: the same silent presence, the same hidden mind and nothing said and nothing indicated but the slow slaking of thirst and stilling of hunger.
    “Do you know what became of mother’s finches?” she asked him, pulling out a chair and sitting opposite him as he ate.
    “No. Do you?”
    “Yes. I think so.”
    “Oh? And what might that be?”
    “I think you killed them.”
    For a moment only, he sat still—the spoon just emptied poised above the dish. Then he narrowed his eyes and squinted at her before he spoke—and when he did, his voice was colourless and his words without inflection.
    “Oh, that,” he said. “I did that day before yesterday.”
    He then went back to eating.
    Soup sounds.
    And then: “do you mean to tell her?”
    “No. Of course not.”
    “Am I to tell her?”
    “No. No one is to tell her. All we need to say is: they went away. She’ll understand.”
    Elvire stood up and turned her back to him. She said nothing more. She wanted to leave the room, but could not. It was impossible to move, she was so afraid.
    “I kept the wings,” Johannes said.
    “I know you did.”
    “In all my life, I’ve never seen anything so pretty. Wouldn’t you agree?”
    Elvire said nothing.
    “I’m starting a collection,” Johannes went on—barely pausing to swallow his soup between sentences, all but choking on his words—and the words still monotonic, clocklike in their precision. “I like the feel of the feathers—and the way they lie just so…you know? One lying down beneath the other…all in a row…and when you spread them out they make a perfect fan…just like those Spanish ladies hold in the magazines…just like a Spanish dancer holds…”
    “Stop it.”
    “What?”
    “ s TOP IT !”
    “Stop what?”
    “Speaking—talking—saying those horrible things. Stop it!”
    “But it isn’t horrible. Why call it horrible? Look. Look, Elvire. Look. Turn around and look. I’ve got another one right here.”
    Terrified, she turned.
    Johannes, dead-faced, sat there, his plate emptied, his spoon laid aside—and in his hand a freshly killed bird.
    Elvire stared at him.
    Clearly—all too clearly—he was mad.
    She reached out her hand and took the bird—it was a young pigeon—and spoke to Johannes quietly.
    “I will keep it for you. Yes? You can’t want to take it with you back to school. The other boys would harm it. They wouldn’t let you keep it.”
    He said nothing.
    When he had gone, Elvire put the pigeon in the stove and burned it.
    By the time Johannes returned at five o’clock, Frau Eda was there and, with her, a doctor from the Burghölzli Clinic. Standing at the curb was the famous yellow wagon which would take Johannes away.
    By the time three years had passed, Johannes Kessler was pronounced cured. What emerged from the Burghölzli wards was a young man whose obsessive violence had been completely turned around. Over time, his gentleness towards his fellow patients had earned him not only the respect of his minders but also the interest of the staff psychiatrists. It would not